As President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris hit the campaign trail this summer, they touted as one of their administration’s accomplishments the passage of the PACT Act, which provided new benefits for hundreds of thousands of military veterans who were affected by toxic chemicals during their service, and their families.
Embedded in that legislation was the Camp Lejeune Justice Act, which was supposed to compensate victims of what some consider to be one of the worst instances of drinking water contamination in US history. Critics say that initiative has been far less successful.
As many as 1 million people are estimated to have lived or worked at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune between August 1953 and December 1987, when the drinking water was heavily polluted with cancer-causing industrial solvents like trichloroethylene, or TCE, and tetrachloroethylene, or PCE.
The Camp Lejeune Justice Act gave people who were exposed to the contamination on the North Carolina base a window of two years to file a claim against the federal government. That window closes Saturday.
The idea was to set up a system to swiftly review cases and compensate people who could prove their connection to the base and specific harm to their health, but advocates for Camp Lejeune victims say it hasn’t worked out that way.
As of August 2, more than 385,000 claims have been filed, but the government has made settlement offers in only 114 – or about 0.03% – of all cases, according to Lt. Cmdr. Joe Keiley, a spokesperson for the US Navy office that’s handling the claims. The Marine Corps is part of the US Department of the Navy.
Just 72 people have accepted those offers, and three have turned them down. Attorneys handling the cases say these offers are often low compared with what people have spent fighting cancer and other diseases connected to the contamination. Some people believe they might do better in court.
The remainder of the people who’ve been offered settlements haven’t responded, according to the Navy.
“The federal government … promised these men and women some form of accountability through the Camp Lejeune Justice Act, and they just really failed to live up to that promise,” said Andrew Van Arsdale, one of the attorneys who is handling victims’ claims.
The Navy said that some of the claims that have been filed are duplicates and that the total number of cases filed will probably go down once it has weeded those out.
“The Department of the Navy remains committed to resolving as expeditiously as possible all valid claims of our Service Members, civilian employees, family members, and all other claims submitted pursuant to the CLJA,” Keiley said in a statement.
If the government fails to act on claims within six months, victims can choose to file a lawsuit, a process that could take years to resolve.
Many don’t have that time: Van Arsdale said that more than 2,000 people whom he’s helped to file claims have died while waiting for a response. In theory, their families could continue the effort, but it becomes a different and more difficult case to make, he said.
One of those clients was Terry McClure, whose widow, Denise McClure, has vowed to pursue her husband’s claim.
Terry McClure was a baker in the Marine Corps stationed at Camp Lejeune in the late 1970s.
“So he washed his hands in the water a lot, cooked with the water, showered with the water, swam in the water,” his widow said.
“He said that he knew that the water smelled bad. It was horrible, and that was basically all they drank was water,” said Denise, 62, who now lives in Louisville, Kentucky.
Terry died in 2023 at age 65 from complications of Parkinson’s disease.
That same year, a study of the medical records of more than 340,000 service members found that Marines stationed at Camp Lejeune had a 70% higher risk of developing Parkinson’s disease than those at Camp Pendleton, in California, which did not have contaminated drinking water.
The link between Parkinson’s and the chemical contamination at Camp Lejeune is so solid that the government recognizes it as one of nine injuries that could fast-track victims’ claims for financial compensation.
Attorneys filed a claim for Terry McClure in 2022, but the Navy hasn’t responded, according to Denise and her attorneys.
Denise said that in the last years of Terry’s life, she had almost no help taking care of him. She had to buy a special trailer for their car to get him to medical appointments and put a hospital bed in one of their bedrooms.
Money from the Navy, she says, might have allowed her to hire more help and keep him comfortable at home for longer.
Now, she says, the money would help make her family more secure.
“What Terry always wanted to do was take care of me, so it would make him happy knowing that I was taken care of and that I could help take care of my grandbaby.”
Denise hasn’t filed a lawsuit because doing that could take her out of line for consideration of a settlement, if any.
She, like many other families, feels caught in legal limbo.
“These folks are not looking to win some sort of lawsuit lottery here. They just want a little bit of resources to seek the medical care that they need and live out their final days to the best of their ability,” Van Arsdale said.
Last year, an email from Navy attorney Jennifer Tennile Karnes to plaintiffs’ attorneys blamed the delays on lack of manpower and funding to handle the claims. Karnes said the Navy hoped to double the number of staff in the tort claims unit by the end of last summer and had been setting up an online claims portal. The email was first reported by Bloomberg Law.
The Navy now says it has “drastically increased” the scale of its processing operations by creating the Camp Lejeune Claims Unit, which includes 100 civilian personnel and 53 contractors. It has also finished the online management portal that allows people to track their claims and communicate directly with personnel processing their file.
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This year, two members of Congress from North Carolina – GOP Rep. Dr. Greg Murphy and Democratic Rep. Deborah Ross – proposed corrections to the Camp Lejeune Justice Act that they hoped would break the legal logjam.
The bill would clarify that people exposed to tainted drinking water at Camp Lejeune don’t need prove that they were exposed to certain levels of chemicals while living or working there, according to a spokesperson for Murphy. It would also permit these cases to be transferred outside the Eastern District of North Carolina, which is currently charged with handling all of them.
Murphy hopes the bill will be marked up in the Judiciary Committee by the end of this congressional session, a move that would pave the way for consideration by the full House next year.
Van Arsdale says that more than 1,800 lawsuits have been filed, and the first trial dates have tentatively been scheduled for the middle of 2025.
Denise McClure knows that for many, that will be too late.
“They need to do something for these people while they’re alive, not after they pass,” she said.